A White Elephant in Asphalt: The United States and Transport Policy in Bolivia, 1941-1951

John Hillman

Abstract

In July 1946 a popular uprising deposed the military government headed by Major Gualberto Villarroel and ended the first regime in which the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) played a major role in attempting to reconstruct the political economy of Bolivia. Five years and eight months later the MNR led another popular uprising which deposed another despised military government and ushered in a far more radical process of reconstruction. The Bolivian National Revolution of 1952 was such an important event, not only in the history of the country but in the history of Spanish America as a whole, that the historiography of the intervening period, the sexenio, has focused on the route to that revolution. As conflicts became increasingly intense and violent in the mines, the cities, and the countryside, the ruling body was inevitably defined as a traditional, oligarchic, and reactionary regime, a mere instrument of the tin oligarchy of the large mining companies and their allies, known as the rosca,